Can there be patterns found in musical structure of songs that make having sex hard?


What structures can we find? I took a few songs that I think represent not very sexy songs very good. The energy and valence levels are quite high indicating very happy music. I tried to pick songs that one would find absolutely not sexy by listening alone and want to see if there are similarities between the songs. If similarities can be found among songs outside of genre, lyrics or subjects we might get a more clear idea of what makes music not sexy.

As we can see there are no direct links between the songs chosen. Especially Boom, boom, boom drom the venga boys does not seem like a strange structure. Carameldansen and peanutbutter jelly time share more together. they are both bery high in energy and valence but also very repetative.

You can leave your hat on but how about music that is not sexy?

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What makes music not sexy?

For this corpus I took two Spotify playlists that claim something about having sex to the music that’s on it. One is songs to have sex to and one are songs not to have sex to. I hope to find the musical features that make music more or less sexy than the other playlist by using the Spotify API. I hope to utilize these musical features to get a first insight in musical properties and link these to cognitive functions in either stimulation of the brain or even the parts that give us sexual arousal. However, I only expect to find a link between general positive stimulation of brain. The aim is to find what it is that makes the songs not to have sex to absolutely not sexy.

As a musicologist it would be easy to find the things that make music sexy or not because the obvious answer would be the subjects of the songs. The lyrics are funny or the songs are parodies of well known songs, party music or famous movie scores. I want to see if I can find musical features that also indicate a level or non-sexiness.

To achieve this I will first look for major differences in the musical features presented by Spotify to see if I can find differences. When I have found differences I will compare these with a visual graph to make the data visual and readable. Because songs that are sexy are very much dependable on what genre a person is interested in I will add two playlists to the visuals. One with music that fits in either the sexy or the non-sexy playlist and one with more of the genre of from the songs not to have sex to. This gives me more data to compare with so I can further filter the musical features of non-sexy music.

Music that is not sexy is in fact very happy.


First results.

In this first plot we see the results of the playlists songs not to have sex to and songs to have sex to. In general it seems that the results are spread everywhere. But when we take a closer look it appears that the sexual songs are somewhere around the middle of the energy range and the non-sexual songs are either very energetic and loud or very low energy and very soft. With the non-sexual songs the valence also seems to be very high or low in connection to the energy levels.When we look at the Funny playlist consisting of multiple songs from the non-sexy playlist but added much more from that genre we can see that the findings stay the same and even more extreme.the outliers we see at the extreme low ends of valence are either noise music or 8 bit, low quality arcade music.

Low-quality or extreme noise sounds are not computed well by the spotify API.


The outliers explained I compared two versions of the Sanic theme from Dr. Robotnek. This song has multiple versions on the playlist two of which are extremly loud and have almost no valence but maximum energy. I think the reason is that the volume of the tracks are so maximized the soundwaves are completely clipped. This results in a noise that is not mesurable for spotify. It appears that these outliers list like a lot of 8-bit theme songs from games give outliers in the results. The song Hyper confirmed also shows weird results in the chromagram.

Can there be patterns found in musical structure of songs that make having sex hard?


What structures can we find? I took a few songs that I think represent not very sexy songs very good. The energy and valence levels are quite high indicating very happy music. I tried to pick songs that one would find absolutely not sexy by listening alone and want to see if there are similarities between the songs. If similarities can be found among songs outside of genre, lyrics or subjects we might get a more clear idea of what makes music not sexy.

As we can see there are no direct links between the songs chosen. Especially Boom, boom, boom drom the venga boys does not seem like a strange structure. Carameldansen and peanutbutter jelly time share more together. they are both bery high in energy and valence but also very repetative.